Huck Magazine- ‘The Lebanese football team uniting the displaced.’

‘We crouch, hidden in the dense vegetation. We are in no man’s land, a strip of neutral territory between Bangladesh and Myanmar. A small stream ahead of us marks the start of Burmese territory. I am with a Bangladeshi border guard, a monitor from Human Rights Watch, and my fixer. Our breath is heavy in the thick, humid air. We hear a series of loud bangs, and then the smell of burning hits us. The guard swings his AK-47 onto his back, crouches to our level, points across the stream, and says, “Look. That’s where they are… So close, again.” He is referring to the Burmese military.........’

‘The odour struck me first: the sulfurous smell of thousands of cow and goat hides stripped bare and left to dry in the baking heat. As my rickshaw drew closer to the village, the driver covered his mouth with a cloth to dampen the stench before approaching the sprawl of houses, shops and leather tanneries. Discarded strips of leather were strewn everywhere on the ground. Bamboo bridges tenuously connected mounds of leather hides that formed islands over pools of toxic chromium-laden azure wastewater. I was in Hazaribagh, a village on the banks of the Buriganga, and the heart of Bangladesh’s leather industry..........’